Cambridge English Corpus

The largest of its kind in the world, the Cambridge English Corpus (CEC) is a multi-billion word collection of texts taken from a huge range of sources, including: newspapers, the internet, books, magazines, radio, schools, universities, the workplace and even everyday conversation - and is constantly being updated.

The CEC comprises several smaller corpora which allow us to look at different areas of language research more specifically. This includes the Cambridge Learner Corpus (CLC) which currently contains over 50 million words taken from Cambridge exam scripts submitted by over 220,000 students from 173 countries, and these numbers keep growing each year. The CLC allows us to conduct internationally relevant and country-specific research into how learners use English differently to expert speakers, as well as allowing us to analyse the different types of mistakes that learners make and what they get right. This research informs our ELT courses.

Our language research features in most of our materials. In particular, we use it to:

• ensure that the language taught in our courses is natural, accurate and up-to-date.

• select the most useful, common words and phrases for a topic or level.

• focus on certain groups of learners and see what they find easy or hard.

• analyse spoken language so that we can teach effective speaking and listening strategies.